The evening seemed to be going so well. I got in from work after a pretty productive day, was greeted by the chickens while walking my bike to the shed, and found W in the kitchen busy cooking curry - the smell of which was wafting from room to room.
After dropping my crash hat, coat, and bag in the study, I discovered the kids in the playroom watching Disney’s verion of Anastasia. I waved silently, and Miss Six returned the gesture.
A few minutes it later, dinner was dished up and we called the Children.
W predicted the next half an hour scarily accurately when she commented “I don’t know why I’m bothering dishing a certain person anything up - she won’t eat it”. So it proved.
Knowing full well what was for dinner, Miss Eight walked towards the kitchen and started her assault with a shout of “BUT I WANTED SCRAMBLED EGG ON TOAST
“Tough”
“BUT I WANT SCRAMBLED EGG
“Stop shouting, or you can go to bed.”
“BUT I WANT”
“Bed”
“NO
We ended up eating dinner without her. I left her sitting on the stairs, and we shut the door on her. We managed to eat most of our dinner without taking any notice of the screams and furious demands from the hallway, but eventually Miss Eleven went out to the kitchen for seconds. Her return prompted a grand finale, which unfortunately prompted her sisters to start shouting Tarzan yodels in response to her demands.
An apoplectic scream of “STOP THAT!” caused us all to burst out laughing, which probably didn’t help either.
The predictable end-game saw me “have a talk to her” on the stairs, and repeat the scene of countless parents over the years - carrying a thrashing child silently towards their bedroom while they grasp at anything and everything, and writhe like they are receiving electric shocks.
Half an hour after “intervention”, and following a few more “talks”, she is fast asleep in bed while her sisters are quite happily tidying the playroom up, and discovering all manner of things they forgot they had - including a wig that Miss Six just walked into the study wearing…
“I look like Mum?”
Just for the record, none of the happenings this evening are mentioned in any of the parenting books I have ever read - I imagine the writers of those books would face the same experience as the psychologists who faced Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. It’s kind of the Kobyashi Maru level of parenting.